Headquarters of Samsung in Mountain View, California, on October 28, 2018.
Smith Collection/gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Shares of South Korean chip heavyweights Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix surged Thursday, a day after the two companies partnered with artificial-intelligence major OpenAI as part of the U.S. firm’s Stargate initiative.
Shares of Samsung hit their their highest since January 2021, rising over 4%, while SK Hynix stock surged more than 9% to hit its highest since 2000.
OpenAI said in a statement that this partnership will “focus on increasing the supply of advanced memory chips essential for next-generation AI and expanding data center capacity in Korea.”
The ChatGPT-maker said the two chipmakers plan to scale up production of advanced memory chips, which are critical to power its AI models.
The announcement came as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met with South Korean president Lee Jae Myung in Seoul, and the top leaders at Samsung and SK Hynix.
Earlier this month, SK Hynix had announced that it was ready to mass-produce its next-generation high-bandwidth memory chips, cementing its leading position in the AI value chain.
HBM is a type of memory that is used in chipsets for artificial-intelligence computing, including in chips from global AI giant Nvidia — a major client of SK Hynix.
HBM4 chips are expected to be the main AI memory chip needed for Nvidia’s next-generation Rubin architecture — a more powerful AI chip for global data centers.
SK Hynix has been a main chip supplier to Nvidia, while rival Samsung has reportedly been working to get its HBM4 chips certified by Nvidia.
— This is breaking news, please check back for updates.